Abstract:

The COVID 19 pandemic was a real revolution in educational processes as it was inevitably associated with a temporary change of the teaching model to an alternative online one due to the circumstances. Undoubtedly, this fact accelerated the digital transformation of universities and led to a fundamental change in educators. On the one hand, professors developed a rich palette of online tools and gained experience in the digital transformation of teaching over the months. On the other hand, universities promoted academic exchanges through learning programs, workshops and conferences in online and/or hybrid mode. In this way, geographical barriers were reduced, making it easier for training to reach larger audiences and for institutions to collaborate more closely. However, migrating from face-to face training to online systems was not an easy task, especially for highly experimental academic disciplines such as sciences, health sciences and engineering.

Laboratory practices in science subjects, based on phenomena that involve the handling of abstract variables, become an ideal tool for students to relate theoretical explanations to practical observations. In addition, they facilitate the development of competencies and procedural skills for the correct professional development in these disciplines. Several pedagogical studies have shown that laboratory sessions have an important educational value because, on the one hand, they encourage active self-learning and, on the other hand, they link the contents of the subject with fundamental aspects of the scientific method such as the search for evidence, the design of experiments, the collection and processing of data, the drawing of conclusions, etc. This fact has a central impact in the higher courses of university degrees. The development of virtual laboratories that can complement or even replace traditional laboratories has recently been a research line of interest. This was particularly relevant under the framework of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Keeping all these aspects on mind, this study reports a teaching approach to foster independent learning in laboratory practices using laboratory simulators in an undergraduate course in the discipline of Chemistry. The subject, called “Separation Methods”, aims to promote learning and develop skills (conceptual, procedural and attitudinal) in chromatographic and electrophoretic techniques, as well as in mass spectrometry. It is taught at the University of La Laguna in the third year of the chemistry degree on the second semester. Of a total of 6 ECTS credits, the laboratory practices correspond to 15 h distributed in 5 sessions on liquid chromatography, gas chromatography and capillary electrophoresis. During the academic year 2019-2020, practical lessons were taught virtually through simulators to a total of 41 students (65.85% female and 34.15% male). This paper presents the results corresponding to the session entitled: “Capillary electrophoresis -mass spectrometry (CE-MS)”. To compare the data, a previous course was taken as control group (assuming that the characteristics of both groups that condition the scores were similar) and, after checking whether the results conformed to a normal distribution, a statistical comparison was made.

Keywords:

Chemistry, COVID-19 pandemic, e-learning, university, virtual laboratory.